reconsider

Motivation is basically the inner engine that drives us to set goals and move toward them. When our motivation is high, we are more driven to achieve and more ready to invest our time, energy, and emotions to reach something that feels important. When it is low, the opposite happens: goal setting itself becomes weaker, and the effort we put in naturally drops. In a workplace context, this shift is directly tied to how satisfied people are in their jobs, how happy they are at work, how well they perform, and how strongly they feel connected to the broader goals of their team or company (1) (2) . Over time, sustained low motivation and its accompanying effects can wear down both sides: the individual employee and the organization as a whole. In this blog series, we will examine workplace motivation through three major motivational theories. Instead of focusing only on how to “boost” motivation, we will explore the psychological mechanisms that shape it.  In this first article, we be...

In today’s world, almost every organization claims to value learning. And to be fair, most of them probably do recognize its importance since adapting to rapidly changing conditions and demands of today’s environment has become an absolute necessity in a competitive market.  In line with this, we see more and more companies investing in training programs, running feedback cycles, conducting performance reviews, and constantly talking about continuous improvement. But the real question is this: Do all these efforts actually make the organization more innovative, more resilient, more capable of reaching its strategic goals? Or do similar problems quietly resurface, while the same strategic miscalculations are repeated in slightly different forms? More broadly, what does it actually mean for an organization to learn? Even at the individual level, identifying the signs of learning and measuring change is already complex. When we shift to the collective level, to some...

Alexithymia, derived from the Greek roots meaning “no words for feelings,” refers to a pattern of difficulties in identifying, describing, and cognitively processing emotions . Historically, the term alexithymia was introduced by Sifneos (1970) within the context of psychosomatic and somatoform disorders, based on his collaborative clinical work with Nemiah. At that time, it was conceptualized as a dichotomous clinical variable. However, the phenomenon itself had been observed long before it was formally named. Various psychiatrists had described patients who showed marked difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions. In the mid-twentieth century, psychosomatic disorders were largely interpreted through psychoanalytic frameworks, particularly Freudian models that attributed physical symptoms to unresolved unconscious conflicts. Yet the limited and inconsistent empirical support for these explanations, along with mixed evidence regarding the effec...

Our body is working without stop. The heart is beating, the lung is allowing to inhale and exhale the air, the stomach is trying to digest the food eaten, and all the other internal organs keep working without any break so that they keep you alive. Humans cannot control these visceral activities. They function automatically, without our permission. Yet, this does not necessarily mean that we are not aware of them. People have the capacity to be aware of the stimuli created in the body performing internal activities. Interoceptive awareness refers to one’s ability to perceive and sense those signals that originated in the body.  Photo by KALZ 📸 🇺🇬 from Pexels Interoceptive awareness is a very insightful and perspective concept for all subdisciplines of psychology. For example, in terms of mental disorders, a considerable number of researches showed a link between negative mood states and maladaptive function of interoception, in the meaning of, misinterpretations or misperceptio...

The impact of personality on business life has long been of interest to both employers and job seekers. While job seekers apply vocational interest tests with the idea that having a profession that best suits their personality will increase the success and satisfaction in that job, employers are trying to determine the personality traits of applicants which are thought to predict the performance of employees in that specific job. However, using personality tests as a selection tool in the process of recruitment has been highly criticized. One of the main concerns is about job relevance in the meaning of whether it is really associated with job requirements (Spector, 1999). This is an important issue to be taken into account since irrelevant measurement tools cause an unfair situation for the candidate and loss of predictive validity of the selection process for the organizations. That’s why it is highly essential to assess specific personality traits whose validity for the job has been...